I’m not always sure that technology and
education always mix well together. Turkle would agree—she is, for example, fairly
relentless, and simultaneously quite thoughtful, about the problems of distance
learning. (MIT apparently tried all this out quite early, and she's not
impressed.) I suppose I could summarize her by saying that human relationships,
and thus teaching, are messy. And that's good—because, through the messiness,
we learn invaluable skills. And tech can interrupt education in other ways. In
my hometown,

there’s a phone app developed by Chico State grads, PocketPoints,
which rewards its users if they turn off the phone during college classes. I have a friend—a younger friend at that—who visited my college classes and cannot
help but notice that, during a quick stretch break I usually offer my students
in the middle of lectures—the students quietly text their friends or check
their social media instead of meeting the people right in their vicinity. He’s
rather blunt at this: “Why wouldn’t these guys want to meet some of the beautiful women
that surround them?”

Indeed. It’s probably because they feel
anxious, more comfortable “connecting” virtually instead of in real time, with
real people. And—though I doubt this is true in my classes—they’re probably a bit bored. Boredom and anxiety—that
potent combination which together make the German word angst and the French version ennui—propel
us toward our cell phones like the proverbial moths to flame. The little shot
of dopamine that’s released as we are stimulated by the new scream has
addictive qualities. And so we continue. And so it is particularly with
emerging adults, who were given screens to quiet them as fussy babies. Such
earlier training is sticky and recalcitrant. This persistent use
of technology can lead to anxiety—for example, “cell phone addiction”—and
emerging adults would seem to be the most vulnerable.

A
moment ago I mentioned Turkle’s defense of the messiness of community.
(“Messiness,” by the way, is my word, not hers.) Conversations in real time with
real people can’t be manipulated to the same degree that virtual interactions can
be. “One new manager at HeartTech, the large software company in Silicon
Valley, moved there so he could leave engineering and try his hand at
management. ‘I left my previous job because it was too predictable. I wanted to
work with unpredictable systems [here he means people].’” She
summarizes this by asserting that we must

“Challenge a view of the world as
apps”

—that
some app on our smart phone leads us toward a seamless solution to all
problems. “The app way of thinking starts with the idea that actions in the
world will work like algorithms: Certain actions will lead to predictable
results. But
human relationships are unpredictable, chaotic, and complex—that’s what makes
them both frustrating and exultant.

This “app thinking” can affect us
relationally and spiritually. To take it up a metaphysical notch, our
relationship with God is messy and unpredictable. The eternal, sovereign, God
of the Bible cannot be managed. As C. S. Lewis put into the mouths of Mrs.
Beaver as she describes Aslan the Christ figure in The Chronicles of Narnia,

“He’s not a tame lion.”

On the other side, I’ve already noted how
technology has historically served the Christian

church in its history. It also
has broader implications according to its contemporary advocates. Researcher
and technologist Jane McGonigal, in her 2010 TED talk “Gaming Can Make a BetterWorld," promotes
the theory that computer games can actually lead to human community. (She’s
also written SuperBetter: The Power ofLiving Gamefully, which
demonstrates, if nothing else, that this tech revolution is going to involve
making up new words.) McGonigal reveals that the world spends three billion
hours a week playing online games—which shocks the audience—she then doubles
down by asserting that we need to do more. How could this be the case? The
problem solving skills of those virtual situations could be employed in solving
real-world problems.

Naturally, almost all commercial forces
see technological use by emerging adults as positive. Because it helps sell
products. And generally, the power and material resources of marketing social
media particularly and Internet use generally—and the devices that use them—is
immense. And don’t we simply enjoy our smart phones? I do.

I know this sounded like I slipped back
into the negative side of the ledger with tech. And that’s where my mind was—in
addition to channeling my “say yes to no” approach around the time of that
book’s publication—when I addressed a group of graduate students from the
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship chapters of Stanford and Berkeley. My task
was to inspire them with how to engage culture, particularly as formed by
science, as bright, energetic, promising Christians. These people could change
the world. That indeed sounds like a cliché. But the more I came to know these
students, the more I thought it might be true.

I began my talks on Christian spirituality
in today’s world with a scene from the film NachoLibrewhere Nacho, a cook at a Mexican monastery, is partnering with
Stephen in a tag team free wrestling, or “luchador libre.” Nacho is naturally a
man of faith, but Stephen denies any belief in God and declares, “I’m a man of
science.” So this is a point of contention, about which Nacho feels fearful just
before I fight against the team of “Satan’s Cavemen.” So, while Stephen is
looking another direction, Nacho baptizes him. And my point (yes, I had one) is
that often we often baptize science with our faith when scientists aren’t
looking. And let’s not do that.

In later talks, I took on the problems of
tech and the reasons to resist it. In and out of Ultimate frisbee games on a
field nestled in the Santa Cruz Mountains and around meals, some of the
students quietly and thoughtfully resisted. Many, in fact, were involved in Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Stanford or the Center for Social Sector Leadershipat U.C. Berkeley. Or they were just making the world a better place. They indeed were the first people to introduce to me to information and communication technologies for development (or ICT4D). “Did you
know that cell phones can help farmers find the best price—so they can survive—in
poor African countries? Let me tell you about it.” “Have you heard about using
solar power to help with hospitals in rural Nigeria?” “I’m working on a project
to bring training to the poorest 1% of the world through media players and I
think Pico projectors can offered training to stem the tide of
pandemics. (Actually, that’s my friend Matt York’s mission and
what his organization One Media Player Per Teacher, or OMPT, did to
fight Ebola, but he could have been there too.)

That retreat may have helped those IV grad
students spiritually, but it was a game changer for me. Though tech can often
be negative for rich people in the northern hemisphere, it can often make the
difference between life and death for the poor in the southern hemisphere.I close with my paraphrase, or perhaps adaption, of a saying from Jesus (see Mark 2:27), "Tech was made for us, not us for tech." Let's learn how to use it well.